I read Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey only after we'd hiked in Arches National park in July.

The book formed my reward for a long day's walk. The book and a pizza. One cannot live on books alone.

The bookstore on the main drag of funky Moab, Utah (Back of Beyond Books) naturally, features the work of Abbey, who worked as a ranger in the area in the late 1950's.

Abbey wrote this about Arches National Park: ​"The air is so dry here I can hardly shave in the mornings. The water and soap dry on my face as I reach for the razor: aridity. It is the driest season of a dry country. In the afternoons of July and August we may get thundershowers but an hour after the storms pass the surface of the desert is again bone dry."​Desert Solitaire, p 142.

A fleeting puddle along the Devil's Garden Trail.

We started the Devil's Garden trail at 6:30 perhaps –– the sun was up, but the shadows were long when we left the paved trail at Landscape Arch. ​​Bonus travel tip: Even in the busiest and most popular national parks, we found that by hiking a few hundred yards down nearly any trail*, we could leave most of the seething mass of vacationing humanity behind.

Sad truth: few tourists do more than meander to overlook, snap a photo, and then roar off in an air-conditioned car.

Edward Abbey was right: "What can I tell them? Sealed in their metallic shells like molluscs on wheels, how can I pry the people free? The auto as tin can, the park ranger as opener."​Desert Solitaire p 290.

*Exception to the trail rule? The Narrows at Zion. It was kind of the only game in town after the landslides of 2018 (aside from scaling bare rock faces). That hike –– a wet, awe-inspiring meander up the slot canyon –– did fill up considerably come lunchtime. Early morning or off-season recommended.

So, back to the dusty devilly trail.

Devil's Garden trail is nearly 8 miles there-and-back again. A good scramble up red sandstone rocks, along ledges, through dusty piñon pine groves. We ran into families of deer –– the females showing ribs and the fawns leggy and curious –– a couple of parties of human hikers, lizards of various stripe, intriguing tracks in the sand, and the odd path marker.

​Some markers odder than others. To a certain sort of thinker, this is an ambiguous sign:

I read it first as a series of nouns: road + leaf + laundry.

Clearly wrong.

A series of verbs: follows + goes + cleans.

Er, nope. Because, you know, why? But interesting. Return to this thought later, I told myself, tucking the camera back into my pocket.

I stopped for a sip of water a hundred or two hundreds yards later. The words transposed themselves: Trail Wash Leaves.

That seemed nearly probable: maybe the trail had a new name. The National Park people seem to engineer their signage so that visitors can have a more genuine park experience, complete with navigational anxiety and an understanding that maps are imperfect representations of the truth.

Maybe. But probably not.

It's a long walk, and I kept puzzling over these three peculiar words. Wash. Trail. Leaves. Perhaps I was a little dehydrated, guzzled gallons of water notwithstanding.

Most human language follows a predictable formula: Noun verbs an Object. Dog bites man. Woman reads book about a desert.

Leaves. Trail. Wash.

​

The pieces fitted together a half mile or more later: Alert, hikers: your trail, which has followed the path of this dried stream-bed –– known locally as a wash or a gulch –– is about to diverge from the stream-bed.

Oh. That.

Huh.

For the rest of the walk, series of words started presenting themselves. Triangular structures, each side a simple word that goes both ways: One can trail one's hand on the trail. One can leave the leaves behind, one can wash the wash.

Stone Ride Ice.Rein Plant SaddleMount Slide Hollow.Chant Riddle Stop.

Then we arrived back at the start of the trail.

And in the blink of an eye, we were addressing ourselves to pizza and cold beverages and a bookstore on the funky little main drag of Moab.

Speculative fiction (what some longtime readers might think of as "SciFi") can be described as the fiction of ideas.

​Even more than other fiction, SF often examines the consequences of one idea across a whole society. For instance, what if robots became so beautifully built that they could pass for human? What if you could outsource your own memories? What if Hitler had won the war?*

*Fans of the genre will recognize that these three "ideas" are at the core of stories by the late, great (but bat-crap paranoid) Philip K. Dick. The guy that dreamed up the stories behind The Man in the High Castle, Blade Runner, and Total Recall (we like the version with Arnold) and a bunch more.

So with SF on my mind, today's writing warm-up exercise:

Story 1The eclipse was less dramatic than she'd expected. Not that she was in the cone of totality, but still, she'd never witnessed a solar eclipse before. Never mind a double.Still, she'd taken the afternoon off, and though the cheap protective glasses had broken –– she'd forgotten them in the seat of her vehicle and then sat on the damn things when she'd slid into the seat in the cool darkness of the parking bay.Still there it was: her first double-lunar eclipse. She watched two penumbral cones shaving the sun into a puny lozenge of light. An unseasonable breeze sprang up. She shivered and wished there was someone next to her. She hadn't considered herself in any way sentimental, but she longed now for something communal, a human companion.The sight of the sun, even as small and cold as it was from this distance, turning just that much smaller and colder –– well, she felt for a moment that she understood primitive superstition.And then, as quick as the remembered snap of a plastic tiddley-wink, the moons parted and the sun shone round and bright again.

Story 2He kept watch on the mirror-calm surface of the water, barely breathing.He was comfortable –– or anyway about as as comfortable as anyone zipped into a breather suit and strapped bodily against the pot-bellied ventral surface of a drone hopper could expect to be. He refused to consider the blurring of the features of shore, blocked out thoughts of the hopper's speed (only a quarter-sonic, almost survivable without the suit), kept his attention on the glassy reflection of the sky.

The handful of beta-blockers he'd swallowed at the start of his shift was working to keep his blood-pressure low. He shrugged his shoulders against the petal-soft lining of the suit. He stretched the webbing between first his left and then his right hand.

Eyes open, he told himself. He was going to need to be very quick and very lucky or he was going to end up very dead. And he wouldn't be the only one.

*I love that phrase, which goes something like, "In April...then folk do long to go on pilgrimage," from the opening sentence of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.

In the interest of brutal honesty and over-sharing, inside that ellipsis? Those three dots contain an entire universe of wordy wordy words that may have in played a pivotal role in my decision NOT to pursue graduate work in English.

As a young student, I heard the Middle English version of the prelude to The Canterbury Tales once and was interested –– my word, how German it sounds! And it's almost comprehensible! Wow, 600 years later and the language is so different!

The second time it was quoted at me, I began to find the thing tiresome.

The third time, I realized quoting the opening lines of The Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English was a painful dating stratagem of people in my chosen field of study. The idea being, perhaps, to stupefy and render the object unconscious.

In case you think I am being over-dramatic, I give you a YouTube video (Go on, I double-dawg dare you!) of the poem.

You can imagine the performance when combined with a certain brand of collegiate earnestness and ardor.

PS: Yeah, by the way, "Old English," which is what you might think this guy is speaking? That's what people spoke before 1066 AD.

​Geoffrey Chaucer was writing around 1400 AD. If you were to make this rookie mistake when someone is fervently quoting Chaucer at you at an English department event, you might never escape the lecturing.

Still, April is a time when folk DO long to hit the road.

Springtime itchy feet.

​Questing for sunny beaches or the last few downhill runs, going for the peak cherry blossoms or those first bulbs poking heads out of the mud.

The Caterpillar by Ogden Nash​I find among the poems of SchillerNo mention of the caterpillarNor can I find one anywhereIn Petrarch or in BaudelaireSo here I sit in extra sessionTo give my personal impression.The caterpillar, as it's called,Is often hairy, seldom bald;It looks as if it never shaves;When it walks, it walks in waves.And from the cradle to the chrysalisIt's utterly speechless, songless, whistless. ​

This batch of B. crini had cute little faces. Seen on Mormon Key, Everglades National Park. February 2018.

Shakespearean butterflies? Sure.

​And where else but Lear? It's a butterfly-ish play**, the madness and the stomping around and all...and for the fastidious, his poetry is a blanker shade of verse than Mr. Nash's.

This speech comes after King Lear and Cordelia have been captured and Lear is delighting in the company of the one who turned out to be his really good daughter:

Lear: No, no, no, no! Come, let's away to prison:We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage:When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down,And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live,And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laughAt gilded butterflies, and hear poor roguesTalk of court news; and we'll talk with them too,Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out;And take upon's the mystery of things,As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out,In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones,That ebb and flow by the moon.

*That from "An April Day" by William Wadsworth Longfellow. WWL was a BIG fan of April.

*Okay, maybe Lear is not SO much butterfly-ish, but Peter S. Beagle's fictional butterfly quotes Lear to great effect in another work; hence they are joined in my mind.

Writing is not exactly like playing professional football, but sometimes it feels like it.

Stretching and warming up.The tackles and the ice-baths and the bruises.The snail's pace forward.That.bossy guy in stripes on the sideline demonstrating –– incorrectly, as it turns out –– how to perform the hokey-pokey.

But fer reals, like any would-be linebacker, a writer has to practice and run drills. Here's my own little practice session. Omaha! Omaha Seventy-Eight! Set! Hut!

Story 1He woke to the familiar cathedral space of the pavilion. He smelled frost in the air and made a careful effort to roll in place on the cardboard, not wanting to let cold air into his sleeping bag. If he waited maybe half an hour, there would be bitter coffee to warm his hands and burn his mouth. But if he waited too long, someone would hustle him along and there would be no coffee at all. Perhaps it was time already. He braced himself and then slid himself from of the cocoon of warmth, keeping his sock feet on the Ollie-Ollie-Oxenfree safety of his little bivouac. He stretched, feeling the crackle of his joints and an unpleasant stretching of his skin. He was not old –– no one would call him old –– but life on the road had weathered him. Only a few silver threads showed in matted hair, but chalky patches of callus punctuated his corners, showing like mushrooms at his elbows and knees.

Story 2In semiphore, the universe was telling him to cash in his bonds, sell his Persian rugs, set the birds free, and dispense with personal hygiene. Things were happening. An electric crackle at the edge of his hearing and the way the flags snapped in syncopation? It was all coming clear. They were directives, acronyms spelled out in flags, commands that he could not ignore. He'd been waiting, he realized now, for his whole life for this. He found himself holding his breath, counting steps, feverishly translating phrases into Latin and then Spanish and then back into English. The sense of impending moment, like a cresting wave arrested briefly by the shutter of a camera, arched above him. The heavy perfume of orange blossom intoxicated him with sweetness. He woke to the familiar cathedral space of the pavilion. He smelled frost in the air and made a careful effort to roll in place on the cardboard, not wanting to let cold air into his sleeping bag.

Story1Absenthe, she tended to remind herself, does not make the heart grow fonder.

Her thoughts slid, like the needle finding its vinyl groove, to her long-ago college adventures, already three generations too late to know about the real Absenthe. A young dreamer 80 after the green fairy flitted through fin-de-ciecle Paris. In French, la fée verte, the fairy who inspired and drove artists mad.But maybe that was just the wormwood talking.

She knew the flavor –– anise, of course, always licorice –– and she knew how the emerald-green liquor clouded into the color of a mint milkshake when mixed with water.

"Give a chap a drink," they used to call across open space to one another, college kids with a yearning for Hemingway's sort of possibilities.

"Isn't it pretty to think so," was the correct response. A bit of self-conscious whimsy. A pose. Ersatz nostalgia with a wink.

They usually ended up with beer. It was cheaper and plentiful, and it was only much later that anyone laid hands on the heavy glass bottle that held a genuine green fairy.

But they were just college kids afternoon-drinking then, hoisting glass mugs of yellow beer, waxing gently ironic about their dreams.

She shook her head as she trudged along, and then caught the eye of a young person –– boy? girl? not that it mattered, a slim figure dressed entirely in black who probably thought she was a crazy old bat. Far ridere il polli.

She felt her shoulders rise in an exaggerated shrug and quickly added a neck roll to make herself look less ridiculous. Wormwood, she had been thinking, artemisia absenthium, a medicinal bitter herb.

Stopping to catch her breath and shift the shopping bag from left to right, she considered the plant. Silvery leaves dried like sage, with the scent –– what else? –– mildly licorice-scented. If she remembered her Culpeper's Complete Herbal (circa 1653), and she did, "This herb is good for something, for God made nothing in vain."

She expelled the irony in one sharp exhale: "Or anyway, Isn't it pretty to think so?"

He probably needed to warm up before tortoising. Today's writing prompt comes all the way from the Galápagos.

Pranayama

He tried to still his thoughts.

Circular breathing. He counted in with the breath: one-belly, two-ribs, three-shoulders. He attempted to send his breath into the interstitial area, wherever that was––! And then out again: shoulders-one, ribs-two, three-belly. And pause.

He was happy to pause. He could out-pause anyone. Not that it was a competition.

The instructor went on, and he decided to keep pausing. He'd hold still, he figured, and then nip back in next time.

Like Arlo Guthrie, he'd just wait for the chorus to come around again. Circular breathing was frustrating and difficult, but the practice was only forty minutes out of a day.

Ah, there it was: Inhale. He did, trying to make the breath open first his belly, then ribs, and finally, shoulders. Or what would be shoulders, had he any. Ribs? His ribs were fused into carapace, and everyone knew a carapace didn't –– shouldn't!–– flex. And what chance did his belly have against the dusty plastron? He lived inside a shell corset, and he might just as soon ask his breath to give him wings.

He recognized the monkey-brain resistance and focused on the air moving through his sinuses. He sipped the air in and ahhed the breath out. His eyes closed. In. Out. In.

The class finished and the day turned into night before he opened his bleary eyes again. The night was absolute, fog blotting out the yellow streetlights and the stars alike. Damn, he thought. How long was I out? I wonder what year it is.

It's no secret that I write. As I look over the years' worth of blogs, however, looks like I haven't shared a whole lot about the stories that are most important to me.

To be fair, I hope to sell 'em, but still.

So to say thank you for stopping by and reading these thousands upon thousands of bloggy words, I'd like to offer something I care about more.

Here's a holiday scene from my first novel (unpublished so far! dang it!).

Story background: The narrator, Nicola, is trying to put the pieces together after her older sister, Viv, is badly injured in a car-wreck. The two girls more or less raised each other after their parents abandoned them as children, but they have drifted apart in their young adulthood. This is Nicola's memory of the first winter when the two girls were living on their own.

​I was in charge this year, and I knew what sorts of things I wanted for us on Christmas morning. Since kindergarten, I’d wanted a decorated tree in the house with presents under it. I wanted good things for my sister and me to eat –– no greasy goose, no stringy turnips, no heavy spoon-bread.

​ And I wanted “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” and “Jingle Bell Rock” –– the silliest of the Christmas songs –– playing on the radio, loud.

So as my sister was forever advising, I made a plan. When the two of us got up late and ate cookies for breakfast with the radio playing popular carols full blast, my sister would open first the small, heavy package of batteries, then the leather-bound old book I found for her at a rummage sale and finally she’d tear the wrapping off the big, rattling box of Operation by Milton Bradley. I’d taken the trip to the Sears store in Watertown with one of my baby-sitting families, so I was sure she’d be completely surprised.

After presents, we’d eat more cookies and play Operation until we were ready to eat the cold sliced ham and mashed sweet-potatoes and pumpkin pie I’d made for dinner.

I was happy that night. On Christmas eve, with the wind whispering around the corner of the house, I did not feel lonesome. I made Christmas cookies and refilled the tea-kettle. I brought in extra loads of firewood to save having to go outside the next morning. I snipped paper snowflakes to hang in all the windows and considered the many advantages of my sister’s and my solo state. When Viv came home, I was happier yet. She kept her pea-coat buttoned when she came in and she dashed upstairs with her hands in her pockets, clutching something lumpy under her coat. From upstairs, she shouted, “Will you start me a pot of tea? Peppermint?”

I made the tea slowly, with a lot of extra scrapings and clankings so that if Viv were making any noise, she’d know I wouldn’t be able to hear her. When she came downstairs, she dunked cookies into her tea and admired the tree and the decorations.

I think it snowed a little overnight that Christmas. Or anyway, it felt like it had snowed for that first Christmas: a light, beautiful blanket of white covering everything outside the windows. Perhaps I’m making the memory prettier than it was, but I remember the field being as picturesque as a Grandma Moses scene.

On Christmas morning we slept in a little and when we made our way downstairs, we each had gifts tucked under our arms. My sister –– contrary to every Paris-edition-Vogue-influenced particle of taste –– produced an extravagantly wrapped package of pastel day-of-the-week underpants for me. In the autumn, when I told her about how all the girls in my gym-class had day-of-the-week panties, she said it was the tackiest thing she had ever heard. Her scorn hadn’t really changed my wanting them, but I hadn’t mentioned it again.

Still, sometime between then and Christmas, she’d made the trip to Woolworth’s in the face of her own sense of fashion. She also got me a sleek and expensive Koh-I-Noor technical pen, which I knew for a fact I had never mentioned aloud. She must have noticed me silently fingering it at the art-supply store in Watertown and gone back for advice, because the pen came with two bottles of ink and a tin of horrible-smelling cleaning solution.

​Viv and I stayed in our pajamas all morning with the woodstove pouring off heat, drinking cup after cup of hot chocolate and eating cookies. We sang along with the radio, making up a silly dance for the various versions of “The Little Drummer Boy” that kept playing.

​Viv was unbeatable at Operation, as anyone could have predicted; she took out and replaced the breadbasket piece four times in a row before Sam’s red nose lit up.​Later, when Viv had curled up on the couch and stuck her nose into the dusty old book, I filled the ink reservoir of the technical pen and then applied its unforgiving pinpoint nib to paper. I sketched my sister with her hair messy and her sock-feet drawn up to her butt on the saggy old couch, I sketched the fat little Christmas tree beside her, each needle of the pine tree a tiny, single, scratch of ink.

There would be no escape this day. Sqantahonoh-neehoit (a name that roughly translates to "rhomboid-shaped fruit of the false-kola cactus") resolved again to bide her time. The art of survival was patience. It was a thing she'd come to know, along with the feel of the saddle on her back and the tug of the lead-line.

She'd witnessed what happened when patience ended. Her herd-mate, Gohollin-ah (meaning "Speedy wooly caterpillar" or, with a slightly different inflection "Wooly kitten"), had been lost to such an event. A day like any other until the moment of impatience. Followed by panic, a loud outcry, and a beating that ended badly. Before even the moon had a chance to rise, Gohollin-ah was taken away in a vehicle that smelled of blood and fear and death.

A hard day and a sorrowful night it had been.

The scent of freedom came to Squantohonoh-neehoit now –– nearly masked by the carnival odors of corndogs and fry-dough, and the tang of hot pavement –– on the dusty wings of the breeze. She did not reveal the glowing coal that was her spirit. She snuffed deeply of the freedom-wind, and reminded herself: I am patient. Patient as the log that waits for water. Patiently waiting for the flood to carry me free.

She would run again, she knew it. She would run and roll in the sand. She would crop sweet green grass and drink clear water as it sparkled over rock.

She did not hear her own deep sigh of sadness and longing.

She did not know that her patience would save her. She did not know the shape of the freedom could shift and change like snowdrift in a blizzard. But it would.